Chef headquarters in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Tom Krazit)

Seattle’s Chef released three new infrastructure management tools Tuesday designed to help customers who adopted Chef for their on-premises servers chart a new course in Microsoft’s cloud.

The Chef Automate Managed Service for Azure, now available as a limited public preview, will allow companies that are using Chef to help manage their own infrastructure to start using Microsoft Azure without having to set up Chef Automate again on Azure by themselves, Chef said in a press release. That will significantly reduce the time and effort needed for Chef on-premises users to get up and running on Azure, according to the company.

Chef Automate is used by operations teams to, well, automate a lot of the drudgery involved with setting up and maintaining computing infrastructure. It enforces software compliance policies, monitors the health of applications running across your network, and helps make sure the right people have the right level of access to different parts of your infrastructure.

Most early Chef customers were companies that ran most of their applications on their own servers, but the steady march of cloud computing and newer infrastructure strategies like containers have forced Chef to re-architect its products for this modern era. Automate 2.0 was released earlier this year to help customers use the same infrastructure management tactics across multiple environments.

There’s already a managed version of Chef Automate available on Amazon Web Services, and adding Azure signals that Chef customers are looking at multiple cloud providers as the market grows. Chef announced the managed Azure version of Automate alongside Microsoft’s Ignite 2018 customer conference in Orlando, where Microsoft has rolled out dozens of new features for its cloud service.

Chef also announced two additional services for Chef/Azure users at Ignite, making it easier for customers to make quick configuration changes to their infrastructure and making its InSpec compliance software work with Azure’s own infrastructure management tools.

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